Hannu Salama

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Hannu Salama: A Writer between the Social Classes

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Hannu Salama's work and his development as a writer reflect the relationship between literature and society in Finland. Salama was born in 1936 in the industrial city of Tampere, which since the fifties has been Finland's second literary capital—the retreat of the realists, of those opposed to the Helsinki modernists. Earlier Tampere writers like Lauri Viita … and Väinö Linna … represent the "proletarian writer" type in Nordic literature….

Hannu Salama did not join the Tampere group. Having dropped out of school, lonely and fearing hereditary schizophrenia, he shut himself up in the attic of his proletarian home in order to learn to be a writer…. He was able to view his own unusualness objectively in his first novel Se tavallinen tarina (The Usual Story; 1961), which describes how a young girl is driven to mental illness. The work can be interpreted in terms of R. D. Laing's existential psychology, for it describes how depersonalization is encouraged in everyday life, especially in a family with a history of schizophrenia, to the point where the sensitive individual is forced outside the organizational lines of society.

By 1963, after the publication of three works, Salama began to enjoy an established position as one of Finland's promising young modernists. But the following year he published Juhannustanssit (A Midsummer Dance), a "well-made" novel telling the story of ritual midsummer festivities which end in disaster, and a literary storm was unleased. He was taken to court and heavily criticized by the Church. The underlying reason for this furor was undoubtedly Salama's mercilessly realistic picture of the superficiality of life in the upper social classes. The leading figures of the Church and the Conservative Party succeeded in finding a paragraph of the law by which they could accuse him of blasphemy. (p. 28)

After Juhannustanssit he took refuge in a way of life outside all the approved social classes. A bitter disillusionment pervades his description of bohemia in the novel Minä, Olli ja Orvokki (I, Olli and Orvokki; 1967); he sought new contacts with the proletariat in Siinä nakijä missä tekijä…. (pp. 28-9)

"I, Olli and Orvokki" can be regarded as a weapon of revenge. The novel is written in the first person; the narrator is a writer who breaks off his relations with the bourgeoisie and becomes involved in a petty but destructive relationship concerning money and love in the world of Tampere shopkeepers and small-time businessmen. The description of destruction is violent; its spiritual parents are Céline and Henry Miller, but in the background is also the older bohemian tradition of the nineteenth century….

As if as a side product, this bohemian novel gives a picture of a society in which nothing stays still: no social status is permanent; the position of soldiers, technologists and businessmen is shown to be transitory; the heroic struggle of the proletariat to secure basic human rights has largely ceased. Salama paints an aggressively satirical picture of the reality of "capitalist morality." But in the end the main character of the novel understands that his permanent rebellion has isolated him from other people; he finds himself in a state which could be called the shipwreck of individualism. Like Dostoevsky's heroes, he has turned the relationship between normality and abnormality on its head. He sees himself as a modern barbarian who wants to preserve a real awareness of life, passionately to oppose anything which closes people's eyes to all but their own well-being. This kind of attempt to be a superman is not easy. The Finnish philosopher G. H. von Wright has found it in Dostoevsky and calls it "the tragedy of freedom." The attempt at unconditional freedom turns into its opposite: slavery to impotent desires, the state of possession.

But there is one thing which Hannu Salama's writer must hold sacred: he can deride everything but his own novel, which he has been planning for a long time, an "epic about an ideal communist people."… The "I" of the book always declares himself to be on the side of the workers and against their enemies, the bourgeoisie and the power of the state. But he has no desire to become an unconditional admirer of the left wing—his own experiences lead him to distrust such blind idealism. (p. 29)

In Salama's novel the different generations of the family he describes throw communism's stages of growth into sharp relief. The Salminen family, central in the novel, represent the country people who have recently moved to the city and whose grandparents' generation were still living in the forests under primitive conditions ruled by belief in magic and even witchcraft. Their descendants have become embittered in their new city lives, and from their ranks Salama develops two extremely vivid characters: the parents of the writer Harri Salminen, the novel's main speaker. The father is a comic, picaresque hero, boastful, self-important and at bottom a helpless rogue; the mother, on the other hand, is bloodthirstily bitter about her social conditions, changeable in her support of different causes, a vital female, a kind of cross between Moll Flanders and Mother Courage. A Stalinist critic later dismissed these characters as "quarrelsome and sneering."

In the workers' suburb of Pispala, as Salama describes it, there are also representatives of industrial communism, warriors of the class struggle with a strong grounding in the theory of revolutions. There are unresolved problems between them and the backwoods people, but the front against the surrounding world is all the same united; for this workers' community, set on a ridge between two magnificent lakes, has through the pressures exerted by "official" society, become a compact citadel fortress whose members' solidarity is genuine. They know who are "them" and who are "us"; they are exiles in their own country. Their heroes are their comrades who have emigrated to the Soviet Union or to the United States, and from them they expect help.

The basis of Salama's novel is a political, social and cultural-anthropological picture of the workers in the years 1918–44, but he is not content with retrospective description, with outlining the past in terms of its own values. The picture changes when Salama adds to it the time factor, the perspective of the period in which he writes: in the 1970s the old Pispala no longer exists. In the old workers' town people were—in spite of their disagreements—closely connected with each other through ties of family, kinship, political activity and work. In modern society these ties have disappeared. Those men of the resistance who survived the war have found their places in society, families have dispersed and settled in different parts of the country, and the old political leaders have become prosperous bureaucrats who spend their time bickering amongst themselves—Marxist pharisees. The only people who remain the same are the backwoods people, the mother and father. Such people are always the underdogs, longing in the midst of the welfare state for a lost feeling of unity with their surroundings.

The quality of the social change Salama describes has undoubtedly influenced his writing technique. For the most part, he relinquishes the traditional methods of realism. Raymond Williams has said that "the realist novel needs, obviously, a genuine community, a community of persons linked not merely by one kind of relationship—work or friendship or family—but many interlocking kinds." "It is obviously difficult in the twentieth century to find a community of this sort," continues Williams. "In a time of great change the novel does not describe a series of new engagements and relationships," but culminates in "a man going away on his own having extricated himself from a dominating situation and found himself in so doing." In Salama's novel the writer Harri Salminen is this character. He tells his own story with interjections from his mother and father and a large number of other narrators, each adding his or her own version of the truth. Salama provides a Hemingway-like passage as a counterweight to the web of contradictory subjective monologues; it describes an attempt at sabotage by the resistance group led by an agent from the Soviet Union, an unsuccessful attempt which ends in flight, hopeless hiding, alliance with the "forest guard" (a group of people attempting to avoid conscription) and final destruction.

The common theme of the monologues and straightforward narrative passages is the contrast between hard-line communism and more peaceful "revisionism." In the monologues this conflict is expressed in an argument between Harri Salminen's mother and one of the subsidiary characters. The latter says he has seen so much bloodshed in his life that now he can only wish for the destruction of all weapons; the mother's hatred of her wealthy oppressors, on the other hand, is so intense that she is ready to use violence against them. (p. 30)

The most interesting character in the resistance group is its martyr, a man called Taisto Tammelund. He is not simply a character of the past, for there are some clear parallels between his life and that of the narrator of the novel. Both have cut themselves off from their proletarian origins through their interests and education and have found themselves in some way "between" the classes of the social system. The description of the various stages of Tammelund's life is one of the most intense passages of the novel. He is no logical, clearly-defined character, but brittle, acutely perceptive and changing from situation to situation. His death is the result of his brother's betrayal, in turn the product of inflamed family relationships and rivalry over a woman. Thus Salama introduces one of the central themes of the novel: treachery.

O. W. Kuusinen, a politician who was born in Finland but spent his working life in Moscow, uses in one of his works imagery in which fornication is identified with political non-solidarity. In the same way Salama uses his characters' complicated sexual relationships to reflect class betrayal. The theme appears especially strongly in Salama's daring but marvelously successful use of the letter of confession written by the novel's traitor, Lonkanen, which is almost forty pages long and is a kind of spiritual testament. It becomes clear that Lonkanen has, throughout the time-span of the novel, acted as a double agent trusted by both the police and the underground communists, and that apparently both sides have been aware of this duplicity. Lonkanen's justification of his own behavior is that he acted in revolt against the "elimination" of so many Finnish communists in Stalinist Russia; in obtaining informants on both sides of the barricade, he imagines he has been able to protect the innocent people of Pispala. This human wretch has been disappointed and unsuccessful in every possible way, sexually included; he suspects that the unflinching idealists have led better lives than he, but he still cannot recognize the communists' firm faith as the right foundation for living.

Lonkanen's groping and often contradictory testament gives Salama's novel a Dostoevskian tone. Lonkanen's life of suffering seems to have been totally futile, but in the shadow of death he finds a meaning for it through a kind of metapolitical reasoning. He draws analogies between Stalinist Russia and the communist cell in Pispala and defines Stalinist society as schizophrenic, among other things, because of its unusual use of language and its isolation from the real world. Of Dostoevsky's novels, it is The Devils which looms most clearly in the background of Lonkanen's analysis. His thoughts bring to mind Dostoevsky's conspirators' view of the relationship between the leaders and the masses—for example, in Shigalev's prophecy that revolutionary freedom can be guaranteed only by despotic control.

Lonkanen notes ironically that is is the strongest who enforce justice and write history. Against them he places his own weak but nevertheless independent sense of justice. He is ready to do right in the name of wrong. He begins to develop his own philosophy of history out of his own defeat—a philosophy in which the central factors are sin and atonement. He has no sympathy with formal religion as such but thinks that Christianity, for instance, has understood man rightly in its realization of his need for personal atonement. Ideologies which do not take this into account cannot, according to Lonkanen, endure. A view of the world must have an individual basis if it is to be valid.

In contrast to Lonkanen's miserable wretchedness rises the existentialist hero Taisto Tammelund. He believes in action even when all hope seems lost. His revolution is not a part of the historical process; it is an individual revolt against the system which tries to force people to their knees. His problems are the problems of Camus.

Ideological commitment governs Salama's characters' thought to such an extent that the novel can, in Irving Howe's definition of the term, be called a political novel. The different variations of the communist and existentialist views of life take flesh and speak with authentic voices through the characters of the novel. One could find comparisons for Salama's characters in Sartre's resistance novel The Roads to Freedom, but the traitor's confession brings the work closer to Dostoevsky's The Devils. (p. 31)

Minä, Olli ja Orvokki ranks with Siinä näkijä missä tekijä in that in the former Salama describes the shipwreck of uncompromising individualism, whereas in the latter it is a question of the exposure of the collectivist ideas of the "avant-garde," the "new man" and the "positivist hero." To describe these phenomena one can use the terminology of G. H. von Wright, who in his study of Dostoevsky has pinpointed the two forms which the tragedy of freedom can take: the individualist form may be characterized as the desire to be superman; the collectivist form represents faith in the revolution, the dream of the thousand-year socialist republic. Salama is a writer of the tragedy of freedom. His characters, whether described in the language of existentialism or of socialism, do not escape humiliation or defeat; their dreams are turned upside down. Salama's humanity lies in his empathic identification with the insulted and injured. The most important person to him is the individual making decisions in concrete situations; like Sartre, he prefers describing the consciousness of an individual to picturing the assimilation of an individual by a group. (pp. 31-2)

In his descriptions of people [Salama] relies upon his own empirical experience. This has brought elements of naturalism into his writing, which is precisely what angered the bourgeoisie. But side by side with naturalism, Salama's work stresses the importance of an authentic humanity. It is a protest against the "organized front" of society which produces its obedient robots, a rebellion which does not express itself in a normative program but is rather a revolt against all programs, all theories which claim to explain the laws of society at one stroke. For Salama, people are products of their heredity, background and society, but not only that: man has the possibility of freedom—a freedom which may bring with it suffering, guilt and death. (p. 32)

Pekka Tarkka, "Hannu Salama: A Writer between the Social Classes," in World Literature Today (copyright 1980 by the University of Oklahoma Press), Vol. 54, No. 1, Winter, 1980, pp. 28-32.

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Finno-Ugric and Baltic Languages: 'Siinä näkijä missä tekijä'